I hate to be an old fogie but I guess I am. I’m old school when it comes to audiovisual synchronicities. I like to watch them on the tellie with the speakers cranked loud. I do not yet have a home stereo system directly linking digital and analog sources together in an easy manner. Plus I’m stuck in some kind of no man’s land between synching and mashing, with no way to easily share my work. I’d like to reintroduce the idea of levels in synching sometime. No level of the 3 (I know) is worse or better than the others. Just level 3 is more complicated than level 2 and level 2 methods produce more complicated work than level 1. It is difficult for me to justify level 3 without examples, however. Each level builds one on top of the other in a logical manner. I’m about on the verge of sharing a synching work that at least starts to move from level 2 to level 3 for me called Billfork. This was over 10 years ago. I have not taped that one all the way through, but have the bits and pieces fixed, to collage together. The next large one I created, also almost 10 years old, is Head Trip, and this is moving much more into level 3 territory. That had limited exposure to what remained of the synching community at the time, but already we were far into the process of splitting apart after the Shared Fantasia peak. SF, by the way, is level 2 in my definition, but not a peak level 2. Stegokitty’s Darkest City is another example. My SID’s 1st Oz also represented a level 2 sync, and the most dead center example I know of. I would call Billfork, perhaps, an “aged” level 2 sync or synch.
My next large one after Head Trip — again we’re talking 9 1/2 years ago still — was a full level 3 project, a task I wasn’t really ready for at the time in retrospect. Whatever true creative connections with the community I had, they were broken by then. I was on my own. The thing is that after this huge work I went back to level 2 for the next project (spring 2006). But I never really went back to level 1. I would consider all levels audiovisual synchronicity, as each is built on a single cued region or collection of such. If you would like to know more about this I’ll be glad to share what I can. I might also be able to produce some more Head Trip DVDs soon… perhaps.
There was what we determined as a golden age of synching from about 1999-2003, when people as a group were moving beyond Dark Side of the Rainbow and Pink Floyd and exploring new synching ideas and crystallizing many new synchs. It was an exciting, blooming period. If you listen to Mike Johnston’s original set of synching podcasts created in 2007-2008 I believe, you can get a sense of Shared Fantasia’s central role in all this.
As I’ll always see Dark Side of the Rainbow and attached phenomena as the seed or even core of film/album synching I’ll always be a part of any synching community as it exists through time, larger or smaller. DSotR, traditional style, is level 1. It is the ur synchronicity. A very different type of synchronicity analysis can be created from matches within, and I don’t think that analysis is done by a long shot. A study called, let’s say, *rainbowology* could be created even now.
All levels I speak of are technically a mashup, even DSotR. But it’s especially in levels 2 and 3 where a distinction should be set up. I don’t consider myself a filmmaker, yet, ironically, it can be said I have made many films by now, a good number being feature length and sometime beyond. Synchronicity penetrates the levels top to bottom.
If anyone is interesting in all this I can write more about the subject. Thanks for your continued support of the film/album synching community. 🙂
I appreciate your continued ventures outside of the realm of the easily replicatable. It’s the same reason I love Zaireeka, which is predicated on the in-the-moment experience and the openness to randomness.
Thanks for the like and comment MA. I printed out my post here to read on a break. My thoughts are that level 2 and 3, without going into detail yet about them, are actually more replicatable in ways than level 1, which usually involves longer, sometimes much longer single cued regions, or what you probably remember I personally like to call “tiles”. On the other end, when you start breaking apart video and audio sources to smaller and smaller discreet parts, you also move more into mashup territory (art for art’s sake, in a way), although not necessarily. I’ve telescoped down to breaking apart or faceting, I suppose you could call it, a single song into 4 different cues for audio overlap, but that’s about it. Billfork contains an early example for this (perhaps the earliest in my stuff), and I may be able to youtube that particular section. It’s a funny one, because it involves a surreal tv show based on gluing impossible things together on the audio side, which should be “glued together” as one audio tile in the synchronicity. On the video side, we also have a kind of single narrative, but still nonlinear according to movie order. In other words, the video is broken down into 4 related but still chronologically separated parts according to movie order, and arranged to match a continuous audio track. Since the audio resonantly references gluing (or collaging, as it were) the combination of the 2 can be called archetypal in a manner, like it was meant to happen or appearing as such.
Randomness is another exploration of synchronicity that has much promise, however. And there’s the whole debate or potential debate over whether you can actually, successfully “fix” an audio and video source together in a single tile. Is the whole process random, one could ask, for example. I personally don’t think it is, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be multiple ways to create a single tile, or variations thereof. This can be traced back, in ways, to the different lion roar starts of Dark Side of the Rainbow. Ok, I really need to end my break. 🙂
Sunklands 